Thursday, April 30, 2015

As I have often suggested, true believing Freudians are cult
followers. This means that they have sacrificed their rational faculties on the
altar of unshakable conviction.

The truest of the true believers, those who belong to the Lacanian
movement and the Wholly Freudian Church repeatedly mouth phrases they do not understand,
the better to affirm the truth of their conversion.

Had they given the matter some thought they might draw
different conclusions.

Consider Freud’s myth of the primal horde. True enough,
Freud believed that it was a fact, but this merely shows that Freud could not distinguish fact from fiction.

In Freud's myth, the human community was initially structured like a
patriarchal tyranny, with one father possessing all the women. This man refused to
allow his sons any sexual access to their mothers and sisters

The tyranny was such, Freud posited, that the sons banded
together and rose up to smite the first father, thereafter to consume his warm,
dead body, cannibalistically.

Recent research from Saudi Arabia suggests that they did not
need to go to so much trouble. If they had had a little patience, the
tyrannical first father would have died… from heart failure.

All parents and all teachers warn children against the
dangers of sexting. The admonitions are as pervasive as the practice. At the
least, this suggests that children do not pay very much attention to what adults
are telling them.

Ask yourself this: is anyone encouraging children (i.e. high
school and junior high school students) to send photos of their private parts
to their friends? Has anyone told these children that what they are doing is a
good thing? Has anyone told them that it’s a normal part of exploring your
sexuality?

In truth, some people have condoning, even encouraging sexting. Among them is radical feminist firebrand, Amanda Marcotte:

It's
time for a nationwide reckoning on sexting. It's clearly not a temporary fad
but, like oral sex and Rule
34, a permanent part of modern American sexuality. We need to move onto the
second phase, which should involve educating people—especially young people—on
how to sext responsibly. While some risk reduction should be taught (only sext
with people you trust, consider keeping your face out of pictures), the bulk of
this education should be focused on respect and consent.

Marcotte and her ilk are at war against shame. They favor sexual
liberation and they believe that hiding your sexuality from public view
constitutes repression.

If you want to practice the highest degree of shamelessness you should put your
private parts online. Of course, you run the risk of having your boyfriend
share the images with his closest friends… perhaps with the school… but that
would be entirely his fault.

The teenage girl is simply exploring her sexuality, and
perhaps even preparing for a career in sex work. The boy is a monster.

Marcotte wants girls to be taught “risk reduction.” She
believes that boys should be taught how to keep secrets.

But, how can she promote the value of discretion while she
is countenancing indiscretion?

When did radical feminists come to believe that boys can or
should be trusted? How can Marcotte counsel young women to trust members of a
gender that she and her cohorts have been excoriating as moral swine for the
past few decades?

If a woman’s sexts are exposed in public by a perfidious
male, ought she to believe that she is not responsible? Is that the feminist
consolation prize?

Does it make any sense from a feminist perspective to
declare that women are not responsible for how they choose to live their
sexuality?

Take another example: imagine that a couple has an intimate
relationship. Imagine that the female member of the couple decides to write a
graphic memoir about their more private moments.

If all is fair in love and publishing, if a woman has a
right to betray intimacy in order to get a book contract, why would a man not
have a right to share pictures of the private parts of his beloved?

Somehow or other, Marcotte has gotten it into her mind that
the royal road to a fulfilling sex life is to be as open and honest and
shameless about one’s sexuality.

Perhaps she is dumb enough to believe this, but intimacy
exposed in public is no longer really intimacy. Every parent and every
individual who cares about the moral character of children knows this.

Some women exhibit their sexuality in public. Some of them
have satisfying sexual relations. How many of them get involved in satisfying
long term relationships?

For most women, being involved in a committed relationship
is the sine qua non of the best sex.

Marcotte is telling young girls that sharing pictures of
their private parts with a boy they love (today) is a natural and normal part
of growing up.

This means that Marcotte’s feminist derangement syndrome has
caused her to countenance destructive behavior. If she had been a raving
misogynist, trying her best to find a way to hurt pubescent females, she could
not have done very much better.

To put it all in perspective, we turn to a new report from
Indiana University—home to the Kinsey Institute, a leader in research about
human sexuality. The report involves college students, young adults who are
presumably capable of exercising moral reasoning. That is to say, people who
would likely be less vulnerable than pubescent teenagers.

Parents
and educators expend a lot of
energy trying to stop kids from sending each other nude photos of
themselves. They run workshops on “digital citizenship.” They preach,
frequently, about online reputation and good judgment and the long-forgotten
value of “self-respect.”

But
they might be missing the real, and really dangerous, sexting scandal — the one
that few people, besides kids themselves, see. According to new
research from Indiana University, as many as one in five sexters are
actually coerced into sending sexual texts by threats or manipulation from
their partner. The practice is so widespread among young people — and so deeply
traumatic — that the developmental psychologist Michelle Drouin thinks it
constitutes a new form of intimate partner violence.

“I
think it is a surprising finding,” Drouin said. “Coercion into sexting caused
more trauma, for both men and women … than coercion into actual physical sex.”

“Coercion
into sexting caused more trauma, for both men and women … than coercion into
actual physical sex.”

It is notable that, according to the study, boys are as likely to sext as girls. Some boys even feel coerced into sending the pictures. Think Anthony Weiner. And yet, most boys seem to be less concerned about these pictures being passed around by a group of girls. I may be naive but I suspect that it is more common for a team of boys to ogle an image of a naked girl than it is for a team of girls to ogle the image of a naked boy.

After all, most consumers of pornography are male.

Of course, Marcotte does not and would never accept coercion
as a motive for sexting. And yet, when a boy tries to coerce or bully or even
persuade a girl to send him a few nude pictures, he might very well argue that
everyone is doing it and that it is a normal and accepted part of modern sexual
experience.

How pervasive would the practice of coercing girls to sext be
if everyone believed that sexting was a bad thing, to be avoided, to the point
of not even being subject to consideration?

The Indiana University study discovered that 71% of the
students had sexted recently, which suggests that the practice is as pervasive
as Marcotte believes. And yet, twenty percent of those say they had been coerced into
doing it.

For those who had been coerced, the mental health
consequences were severe. Describing the psychological trauma that this
produces, the Post reports:

More
surprisingly, when Drouin ran the numbers on the rates of anxiety, depression
and trauma symptoms among her respondents, she found that victims of “sexting
coercion,” male and female,
were more traumatized than people whose partners had coerced them into actual,
physical sex.

For
female victims, sexting coercion was more traumatic even than “traditional
forms of partner aggression,” like verbal abuse and physical violence. That
toll makes sense to Cindy Southworth, the executive vice president of the
National Network to End Domestic Violence, who points out that a nude picture
lives in eternity — it’s an artifact of trauma, and an object of blackmail, that
never goes away.

Why were those who were coerced into sexting more traumatized
than women who had been sexually assaulted?

Southworth is clearly correct here. Once the images are in
the public domain they represent a permanent threat to one’s dignity and
self-respect. They cannot as easily be forgotten or dismissed.

Individuals whose private parts have become public property
suffer an assault on their dignity and their sense of shame.

But, if this applies to those who were coerced into sexting,
why would it not also apply, to a lesser extent, to those who sexted
voluntarily and who broke up with their boyfriends? Surely, a number of girls
and young women have sexted voluntarily, only to have found their confidence
betrayed.

The researchers are especially concerned that sexting is now
considered to be normal. Once people believe that sexting is normal and healthy
it becomes that much easier to coerce people into doing it:

Both
researchers like Drouin and advocates like Southworth worry that it normalizes
abusive behavior — it tells other kids, essentially, that they won’t be
punished if they bully their boyfriends or girlfriends into taking nude
photos. Everybody does it, right?

“Because
sexting is common among youth and young adults today, individuals may believe
that sexting coercion is normal and even harmless,” Drouin’s paper concludes.
And that, frighteningly, could not be further from the truth.

Of course, there are degrees of coercion. When a boy can
tell a girl that she should send a picture of her private parts because if she
does not do it she is abnormal, is not a good feminist or is ashamed of her body, the
coercion might very well feel more like persuasion.

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

BOSTON—Saying
that such a dialogue was essential to the college’s academic mission, Trescott
University president Kevin Abrams confirmed Monday that the school encourages a
lively exchange of one idea. “As an institution of higher learning, we
recognize that it’s inevitable that certain contentious topics will come up
from time to time, and when they do, we want to create an atmosphere where both
students and faculty feel comfortable voicing a single homogeneous opinion,”
said Abrams, adding that no matter the subject, anyone on campus is always
welcome to add their support to the accepted consensus. “Whether it’s a
discussion of a national political issue or a concern here on campus, an open
forum in which one argument is uniformly reinforced is crucial for maintaining
the exceptional learning environment we have cultivated here.” Abrams told
reporters that counseling resources were available for any student made
uncomfortable by the viewpoint.

In America, people like Frank Bruni attack the Tiger Mom and
Chinese educational methods because they believe that children who do too much
schoolwork and perform too many rote exercises will suffer severe emotional
disturbances, even to the point of committing suicide.

We Americans may not know how to teach our children or even how to
bring them up to become good citizens of the Republic, but we are aiming at a
higher good: their mental health.

When British educators saw that their own schoolchildren
were falling behind Chinese students in all measures of academic performance,
they sent a delegation to teachers to China to find out why.

Given
China’s success in international tests such as PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS, it seems
we have been misguided in abandoning the traditional, teacher-directed method
of learning where the teacher spends more time standing at the front of the
class, directing learning and controlling classroom activities.

Great Britain and America adopted “a more collaborative
approach to learning where students had greater control.”

The advent of the new pedagogical techniques dates to the
time of the Vietnam counterculture.

Business Insider describes what happened:

Traditionally,
classrooms have been organised with children sitting in rows with the teacher
at the front of the room, directing learning and ensuring a disciplined
classroom environment. This is known as direct instruction.

Beginning
in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, teachers began to experiment with more
innovative and experimental styles of teaching. These included basing learning
on children’s interests, giving them more control over what happened in the
classroom and getting rid of memorising times tables and doing mental
arithmetic. This approach is known as inquiry or discovery learning.

Influenced by the self-esteem movement, teachers started
handing out large dollops of praise, regardless of whether or not it had been
earned.

The result:

Based
on this recent study of classrooms in the UK and China and a recent UK report
titled What makes great teaching?, there is increasing evidence that these
new-age education techniques, where teachers facilitate instead of teach and
praise students on the basis that all must be winners, in open classrooms where
what children learn is based on their immediate interests, lead to
under-performance.

Studies in Australia, where the new age techniques were also
implemented, drew a similar conclusion:

Many in
Australian education believe children are only really learning when they are
active. As a result, teachers are told it is wrong to sit children at their
desks and ask them to listen to what is being taught.

Again,
the evidence proves otherwise. The UK report suggests that even when sitting
and listening children are internalising what is being taught. Learning can
occur whether they are “active” or “passive”.

Often
derided as “drill and kill” or making children “parrot” what is being taught,
the UK report and other research suggests that memorisation and rote learning
are important classroom strategies, which all teachers should be familiar with.

The UK
report states that teachers need to “encourage re-reading and highlighting to
memorise key ideas”, while research in how children best learn concludes that
some things, such as times tables and reciting rhymes, ballads and poems, must
be memorised until they can be recalled automatically.

Ah yes, automatic recall of multiplication tables, classroom
discipline, teachers who exercise authority… these are the basis of education.

Business Insider concludes that there is a place for more
individualized instruction, but that the foundation for good education resides
in rote memorization:

In the
early years of primary school, children need to memorise things like times
tables and poems and ballads so that they can be recalled easily and
automatically. Education is also about curiosity and innovation and there will
be other times when rote learning will be unsuitable – for example, when
students explore a topic that excites them and where they undertake their own
research and analysis.

Depending
on what is being taught, what has gone before and what is yet to come, whether
students are well versed in a particular area of learning or are novices, and
even the time of day, teachers must adapt their teaching to the situation and
be flexible.

The
problem arises when teachers and teacher education academics privilege one
particular approach to the detriment of all others.

But, how many American educators are capable of admitting that they
got it wrong? When they denounce techniques that are producing better results—on
the grounds that these techniques are fomenting mental illness-- they are
defending themselves and refusing to change their ways.

We will see what effects this study has in Great Britain and
Australia. As for America… American educators’ skill at critical thinking
vanishes when it is directed at them.

Yesterday, David Brooks called out independent American
voters for their poor judgment. Having seen a Quinnipiac poll in which 60% of independents
agreed that Hillary Clinton had strong leadership skills, Brooks responded by
explaining what it means to have leadership skills.

Since 61% of these voters declared Hillary not to be honest
and trustworthy, clearly they do not understand what leadership entails. Or
better, they believe that all leaders are corrupt bullies who push people
around.

Worse yet, many Americans admire the Clintons for their
amorality, their ability to get away with things. The American character has
been corrupted to the point where people believe that the Clintons are role
models for success and that they should become like the Clintons.

It’s the price of idolizing amoral individuals. It’s the
price of extolling shamelessness.

Thus, when riots break out in a great American city more than a few commentators rush to the airways to explain it away, to plead for understanding, to try to redeem it by finding the meaning behind it all.

Brooks gives voice to the thinking of those who voted in
this poll:

Politics
is a tough, brutal arena. People play by the rules of the jungle. Sometimes to
get anything done, a leader has to push, bully, intimidate, elide the truth.
The qualities that make you a good person in private life — kindness, humility
and a capacity for introspection — can be drawbacks on the public stage.
Electing a president is different than finding a friend or lover. It’s better
to hire a ruthless person to do a hard job.

And then he essays to enlighten them:

People
who are dishonest, unkind and inconsiderate have trouble attracting and
retaining good people to their team. They tend to have sleazy friends. They may
be personally canny, but they are almost always surrounded by sycophants and
second-raters who kick up scandal and undermine the leader’s effectiveness.

Leaders
who lack humility are fragile. Their pride is bloated and sensitive. People are
never treating them as respectfully as they think they deserve. They become
consumed with resentments. They treat politics as battle, armor up and wall
themselves off to information and feedback.

You might think to yourself that this excellent analysis
also pertains to other politicians-- ones that Brooks has praised-- who
surround themselves with sycophants, see all politics as a zero-sum game and
who never get anything done.

Such politicians are in it for themselves. If they are not
in it to fill their coffers, they still believe that it’s all about them. Call
it the triumph of ego over the duty to serve the public:

You may
think they are championing your cause or agenda, but when the fur is flying,
they are really only interested in defending themselves. They keep an enemies
list and life becomes a matter of settling scores and imagining conspiracies.
They jettison any policy that might hurt their standing.

It is a
paradox of politics that the people who set out obsessively to succeed in it
usually end up sabotaging themselves. They treat each relationship as a
transaction and don’t generate loyalty. They lose any honest internal voice.
After a while they can’t accurately perceive themselves or their situation.

What does a good leader look like? Brooks explains:

We live
in a world in which power is dispersed. You can’t intimidate people by chopping
your enemies to bits in the town square. Even the presidency isn’t a powerful
enough office to allow a leader to rule by fear. You have to build coalitions
by appealing to people’s self-interest and by luring them voluntarily to your
side.

Modern
politics, like private morality, is about building trust and enduring personal
relationships. That means being fair, empathetic, honest and trustworthy. If
you stink at establishing trust, you stink at politics.

People
with good private morality are better at navigating for the long term. They
genuinely love causes beyond themselves. When the news cycle distracts and the
short-term passions surge, they can still steer by that distant star. They’re
less likely to overreact and do something stupid.

People
with astute moral sentiments have an early warning system. They don’t have to
think through the dangers of tit-for-tat favor-exchanges with billionaires.
They have an aesthetic revulsion against people who seem icky and situations
that are distasteful, which heads off a lot of trouble.

Of late Americans have gotten in the habit of casting votes
that will make them feel good about themselves. They elected the first
African-American president because they believed that it would show that they
held to the right beliefs and that they would feel that they had purged their
souls of all traces of residual racism.

Now they are seriously considering voting for Hillary
Clinton because they feel that it will make them feel good about
themselves. They will show the world
that they have overcome all traces of residual sexism.

If they have no qualms about electing manifestly unqualified
candidates to do it, so be it. Such actions show a higher level of moral
virtue, a willingness to sacrifice the nation to an ideal.

And yet, when you perform an action in order to feel good
about yourself you will most likely fail to consider how it will look to other people. Then you will quickly create problems for yourself.

America may feel good about itself for having elected Barack
Obama to the presidency, but it should have known that in order to function as
leader of the free world the American president would have to command the
respect of other foreign leaders.

In Obama’s case, it has not happened. Nearly all world
leaders quickly understood that the Obama presidency was amateur hour, that
Obama was not even close to qualified for the job.

The same will apply to Hillary Clinton, the world’s most
famous cuckquean. What is there in Clinton’s performance as secretary of state
that tells us that government officials around the world will respect her
leadership?

An America that might elect Hillary Clinton to the
presidency will feel good about itself while the rest of the world is adjudging
it as amoral, decadent and corrupt.

The surviving remnant of world leadership will pass
beyond our shores.

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Christopher Hitchens insisted that God is not great. It’s
not so clear that God got the message.

Now, Melvin Konner insists that women are Great. In his view
women are better than men at just about everything.

Blinded by the light
Konner believes that with the ascendance of Woman, the glorification of women,
the empowerment of women, we will all be entering a new era. Let’s call it the
Age of Aquarius.

Konner appears to be a scientist. He teaches anthropology
and behavioral biology at Emory University. This allows him to gussy up his
ideological predispositions with scientific terminology. This used to be called
scientism, and I see no reason why we should not continue to call it thus.

Those who begin with a preconceived idea tend to cherry
picks the facts that will sustain their argument. They are the idealists and
ideologues.

Real scientists begin by observing facts and collecting
data. They formulate hypotheses and test them against experiments. They
scrupulously report their findings and remain skeptical of the conclusions.

Konner begins with an encomium to women. It is not a
scientific fact. It is not a hypothesis. Saying that women are better at
everything, that they are the embodiment of goodness while men are the source
of all human evil is not science. It is ideology masquerading as science.

Worse yet, it is moral judgment. Everyone who has read David
Hume knows that ethics and science do not mix. The latter is about what is, the
former is about what should.

In Konner’s words:

I mean
that women are fundamentally pragmatic as well as caring, cooperative as well
as competitive, skilled in getting their own egos out of the way, deft in
managing people without putting them on the defensive, builders not destroyers.
Above all, I mean that women can carry on the business of a complex world in
ways that are more focused, efficient, deliberate, and constructive than men’s
because women are not frequently distracted by impulses and moods that,
sometimes indirectly, lead to sex and violence. Women are more reluctant
participants in both. And if they are drawn into wars, these will be wars of
necessity, not of choice, founded on rational considerations, not on a clash of
egos escalating out of control.

And also:

In
addition to women’s superiority in judgment, their trustworthiness,
reliability, fairness, working and playing well with others, relative freedom
from distracting sexual impulses, and lower levels of prejudice, bigotry, and
violence, they live longer, have lower mortality at all ages, are more
resistant to most categories of disease, and are much less likely to suffer
brain disorders that lead to disruptive and even destructive behavior. And, of
course, they can produce new life from their own bodies, to which men add only
the tiniest biological contribution — and one that soon could be done without.

If you need more:

Contrary
to all received wisdom, women are more logical and less emotional than men.
Women do cry more easily, and that, too, is partly biological. But life on this
planet isn’t threatened by women’s tears; nor does that brimming salty fluid
cause poverty, drain public coffers, ruin reputations, impose forced
intimacies, slay children, torture helpless people, or reduce cities to rubble.
These disasters are literally man-made. They result from men’s emotions, which
are a constant distraction to them.

Does Konner really believe that nothing distracts women from
their work in the marketplace? While he worries about men being
distracted by the presence of comely women, he fails to notice that women are
very often distracted by child-care responsibilities.

Konner glories in the fact that women can produce new life
from their bodies, but he fails to consider that most women also undertake to
raise those children, to function as mothers to those children. He ignores the fact that parenting
concerns often distract from work tasks.

A woman who takes her role as mother seriously will likely
spend less time on the job and will be less apt to work as hard. These
distractions do not comprise all of a woman’s work life, but they comprise a significant
amount of it.

You do not have to be a scientist to see this. You need to
blind yourself willfully in order not to see it.

And let’s imagine that women are empowered to the point that
they are in charge, that they run everything. Or better that they share authority
and power equally with men.

In places where it has come to pass, places like America’s
inner cities, the results are not very encouraging.

What happens when men lose their power and authority and
position to constitutionally weaker beings? Do you really imagine that they simply become housewives?

As it happens, Konner does not have a great deal of real
world evidence to prove his assertion. He does, however, observe that the reality
of human history contradicts his beliefs.

Apparently, his mind has fallen prey to the contemporary
religion of worshipping the Mother Goddess.

Konner gives lip service to men’s accomplishments,
accomplishments like liberal democracy, the Industrial Revolution, science, technology, modern
medicine and great art.

Why have women not accomplished as much? Konner can only
explain it by evoking a conspiracy:

But —
another objection goes — men have accomplished great things! Yes, although
given that men have blocked women’s paths to greatness in all fields for
thousands of years, it is hardly a fair comparison. So let us concede: Most men
are not destructive, and not all women are cooperative and nurturing; women
have their own means of creating conflict and oppressing others. But in science
we ask whether generalizations are possible, and in the domain of sex
differences in brain and behavior, they are not only possible but also fully
justified by the evidence.

For all their greatness and their inherent superiority in
all things, women have apparently allowed themselves to be oppressed for
thousands of years. Doesn’t this count as something of a flaw?

Having no concrete evidence to prove his point, Konner conjures
up a vast conspiracy that has oppressed women because it fears their greatness
and success.

Men do it because they are sick. They have been poisoned by
an excess of androgen or testosterone. They suffer from oxytocin deficiency:

The
main mechanism is androgen poisoning. I call it the X-chromosome deficiency
syndrome, and a stunning 49 percent of the human species is affected.

It is
also called maleness.

Konner does not consider the possibility that women’s
testosterone deficiency makes them less apt to compete successfully or even to
want to do so. In a competitive world and a competitive marketplace this might
well be a natural male advantage.

Konner disagrees:

Brawn
mattered for those centuries, but in spite of their greater strength, men had to
make laws to suppress women because on a truly level playing field, women were
destined to compete successfully and very often win.

Which sport is Konner thinking of: basketball, baseball or
football? Does he believe that women are better at fighting wars? If he does,
he needs to show some evidence. Does he believe that women are better at high
technology? If he does, he should show us the record of the Silicon Valley high
tech firms.

As for the brave new world where women will have more
opportunities to show off their superiority, Konner sees it this way:

As
women gain in influence, all else being equal, the world will become more
democratic, more socially compassionate, more equal, less discriminatory, less
sexually casual, and less pornographic.

Now, Konner believes, with Hanna Rosin, that this new world
is currently dawning. He sees women taking more positions of leadership in
business and government.

Does he really think that, in this new world, there is less
pornography?

Monday, April 27, 2015

The proponents of what is called rape culture assert that
over 20% of college women have been raped. The statistics are subject to serious
doubt. Scholars like Christina Hoff Summers have questioned the statistics,
noting that women are safer on college campuses than they are in the society at
large.

The notion that white male fraternity brothers are conspiring
to abuse, humiliate and rape college women does not hold up to scrutiny.
Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s story of a gang rape at a fraternity at the University
of Virginia was a lie.

And yet, those who want believe that privileged white males
are a crime wave embraced the story uncritically.

Even though the statistics have been distorted and the
evidence for “rape culture” is questionable, this does not mean that American college
campuses do not have a sex problem. In fact, they have a very serious sex
problem. It might not be the one that the rape culture activists see, but it is
there.

But it
is not credible that before the piece, the administration was unaware of the
sexual chaos in student life. For nearly a decade, Bill Wilson was dean of the
Echols Scholars Program at the university. He and others in similar positions
reported to the administration what they had heard. Dozens of bright young
college women told Wilson that they had been sexually humiliated, assaulted, or
raped.

They offer further evidence:

A
recent female graduate of the University of Virginia wrote the following for a
class assignment:

Sex pervades almost every aspect of dorm life
that I have experienced. I have seen “dorm incest” (the entire floor hooks up
with everyone else on the floor), [been] “sexiled,” by my roommate having sex
on my dorm bed, and witnessed date rape . . .

They quote another woman’s description of life in a coed
dorm:

Most of the people in your dorm were in the
“friend zone.” Everyone was a “guy.” But even with sweatpants on we recognized
we had different body parts and late at night with a couple of beers things got
more intimate. We were not so much male and female as we were xx who logically
should give xy what they want and what we have. We were all one mutually using
and abusing non-family.

Sexual license was actively encouraged and
funded by the university. From “Spring-break fun packs” full of condoms and
forms of contraception handed out at the student center with a cute note from a
pudgy sunshine face wearing shades saying “Have a Fun Spring Break!” to “Sexual
Arts and Crafts” flyers plastered on the dorm halls—the message is clear:
college is a parent-funded motel party of casual and impersonal, but, yes,
“safe sex.”

The problem did not begin yesterday. It began with the
sexual revolution of the Vietnam Era and the advent of second-wave feminism.

The professors explain:

Fifty
years ago, when the great campaign against single-sex education commenced under
the banner of the sexual revolution, it was promised that by bringing the sexes
into closer proximity, a healthier environment for relations between young men
and women would form. It is possible that this might have happened had our
schools not taken down the conventions and institutional arrangements that for
generations had brought the sexes together in a more or less orderly and
purposeful way.

Back
then, we were told that the old order must be abolished because the standards
and conventions it embodied favored men. Young women would be sexually liberated
and the “playing field” leveled. Therefore, parietal hours were eliminated and
mixed-sex dorms, once inconceivable, became the norm. In the process, the new
unisex coeducational colleges and universities that are so familiar to us today
came into existence. These institutions committed themselves to dismantling the
culture of courtship that until then colleges had accepted and in a variety of
ways fostered within an educational environment.

The
idea was even bandied about that in a coeducational setting, women would be
better able to “domesticate” the men. That goal was soon forgotten, once
marriage no longer figured as a social value and was replaced by the monolithic
aim of success in a career.

Think about it for a moment. Do women living in coed dorms
feel that their space is being violated? Do they feel that they feel that their
modesty and intimacy are being invaded?

Apparently, the new arrangement allows young men to believe
that they can take advantage of young women. When colleges do not put any real
barriers between men and women they encourage this misapprehension. When they do not provide institutional protections for women they are suggesting that women do not need protection, or even that those who abuse women will not suffer any consequences.

And yet, if a woman feels violated and invaded by the
presence of males in her dorm, it would not count as rape within the criminal
justice system. Surely, it is a problem, but it is not going to be solved by guilt-tripping
young men and policing their behavior more vigorously.

Guroian and Wilson explain that the new living arrangements
militate against the old customs of dating and courtship:

Our
unisex colleges and universities have abolished those spaces. What remains,
what they have gone about creating, are spaces that invite and accommodate
hook-ups and casual cohabitation—and open opportunities for forms of sexual
violence that were not likely to happen on campus grounds in the past.

The sexual revolution and feminism conspired to kill off
courtship and dating. If women were going to put career ahead of marriage, they
would be liberated to seek out sexual pleasure for the sake of sexual pleasure.
That is, they would have sex like men. They would do their best not to get
involved in the kinds of relationships with men that would draw them away from
the career track.

Many young women have chosen to act accordingly. Thus they actively
created the hookup culture.

How many women are really hooking up? Surely, fewer than the
mania about it would suggest.

And yet, the question is not so much statistics as
reputation. Once a significant number of young women choose voluntarily to
engage in sexual acts with men they do not know and do not even care to know—the
better to have sex like a man—word gets around.

If it were just an occasional woman here and there, it would
be one thing. But when a significant number of women hook up, anyone who
belongs to the group gains a certain reputation.

It may feel perfectly old-fashioned, like something a mother
would say, but reputation does matter. Once a woman or a group of women gain a
reputation for giving away their sexual favors promiscuously, men begin to
treat them accordingly.

Worse yet, many women who engaged in hookups did not really
want to do so. They had to get themselves severely drunk or stoned in order to
do it.

Did they feel that they were then really consenting? Did they
then feel that boys should have known that, in their inebriated state, their
word should not be respected?

In some ways, as I have long suggested, the rape culture is
an effort to put an end to the hookup culture and to restore some sense of
honor to young women who abandoned theirs too quickly and now regret it.

You may think that the now well-known walk of shame was a
sign of a failure to accept women’s new liberated sexuality, but, in truth, young
women who had hooked up or who had too much sexual experience too soon must
have discovered that it did not make them feel very good about themselves.

Some of them required medication. Few of them got to the
point where they admitted that they had been duped by the sexual
revolutionaries and used by the second generation feminists.

Following the prescribed narrative, they blamed it on white
male fraternity brothers.

Women might imagine that they are now free to write their
own narratives, but they have been captured by the feminist narrative. In it
men are to blame and women (to say nothing of feminists) are blameless.

Telling themselves on the one hand that no one has a right
to judge them and seeing on the other that many men are treating them in a
certain way... they are at a loss.

The moral code of courtship behavior had evolved over
centuries. Feminists decided that it demeaned and diminished women. Some even
thought that it was a conspiracy designed to keep women out of the workplace.

Were you to suggest that the code of gentlemanly and
ladylike behavior was designed to protect and safeguard feminine modesty and
intimacy you would have been dismissed as patriarchal swine. Feminists insisted that
these codes, coupled with parietal restrictions, assumed that women were weak
and needing protection. The only protection a woman really needed was a condom,
don’t you understand?

The authors explain:

… before
the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies, the “yes” and “no,” ­now­adays
promoted as the be-all and end-all of sexual etiquette, were given moral force
by a restraining and clarifying ensemble of conventions and threshold spaces
that the colleges and universities saw fit to sweep away virtually overnight.

Having attended the university at a time before courtship
and dating were undermined, Guroian and Wilson recall the reality of the
ancient regime:

The
truth is that never did we feel the ideal of being a Virginia gentleman
licensed us to treat young women as inferiors with whom we could do whatever we
pleased. Just the opposite. The ideal of a gentleman had the moral power to put
the brakes on our most tawdry and aggressive male proclivities and to make us
take pride in our manhood. Some of us took seriously one line of a poem titled
“The Honor Men,” which we hung in our rooms. It said “pursue no woman to her
tears.”

They continue to point out that these codes of behavior were
designed to protect women from sexual violence:

Back
then, everything possible was in place to prevent a rape or any other form of
sexual violence from being committed in a fraternity house or university
housing. Women were not permitted in dormitory rooms or fraternity bedrooms.
Those notorious University of Virginia gentlemen at the “Playboy School of the
South” enforced their own parietal rules, and housemothers could be found at
fraternity parties until 1968. Young women who visited for an overnight stay
were assigned to “approved housing” that their institutions selected, rooms
more often than not in the homes of widows who had space to let. If a young
woman was uncomfortable with her date, a refuge was available, and there was a
curfew. “No” had the force of strong conventions and in loco parentis. There wasn’t the need for draconian rules and
punishments, because the university and women’s colleges represented real
standards that were reflected in the arrangements they had put in place to
bring the sexes together in an orderly fashion.

Unfortunately, universities are incapable of accepting that
their grand social experiment did not work out as expected:

Our
colleges and universities have not fessed up to the sexual anarchy and formless
sex that they helped bring into existence when they sponsored and
institutionalized the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies. Even as
the evidence has mounted to undeniable proportions that something has gone
horribly wrong with relations between the sexes on our campuses, colleges will
not admit culpability for the ugly scene. Most important, they will not admit
that the great experiment of institutionalizing the sexual revolution has
failed at the cost of many, many ruined lives.

Finally, in the anarchy created by the absence of customs
that determine courtship, schools have imposed their own guilt
narrative. They have replaced a shame culture with a guilt culture… not knowing
that the latter is far less efficient and effective at regulating human
behavior.

The authors write:

Consequently,
when an act of sexual misconduct, violent or otherwise, is alleged, an
avoidance of moral standards under the pretense of extending freedom to young
adults quickly and perversely turns to finding guilt in any party conveniently
at hand….

The
same persons who in their youth supported the liberation of the sexes from
so-called Victorian inhibitions and morals are now rushing to impose at
colleges complex codes of sexual conduct that would have been unimaginable a
generation ago. These codes reveal well the dilemma they face. When equality of
the sexes became the epicenter of the sexual revolution, activists removed all
of the conventions and arrangements that shielded females from aggressive male
behavior. They had to do so, or else they would have appeared still to respect
differences between men and women. But now, faced with rising numbers of
damaged students, they must produce rules of sexual engagement that will stop
the abuses and traumas. The dilemma is this: How do you acknowledge the special
vulnerability of women to men while disallowing distinct codes of conduct for
men and women? The current solution is to adopt a formal and abstract language
that ­maintains the unisex ideal and keeps silent about male–female ­differences.

On the one hand women insist that they are in every way
equal to men. On the other hand women insist that they are especially
vulnerable to men and in need of the kind of special protection that only the
state can provide:

In
January of this year, the National Panhellenic Conference, an association of
national sororities, instructed sorority women at the University of Virginia
for their own safety not to attend the annual Boys Bid Night fraternity
parties. This prompted an immediate counterreaction that has not yet played out
entirely. Female students protested that this directive contradicted the gains
women have made to stand on equal ground with men in social and sexual matters.

Sunday, April 26, 2015

Do you ever feel misunderstood? Do you ever feel that-- try
as you might-- people are misreading your feelings?

If you do, you are not alone.

Professor Heidi Grant Halvorson has written a book about it.
Emily Esfahani Smith opens her discussion of the book with this anecdote:

In her
new book No One Understands You
and What To Do About It, Heidi Grant Halvorson tells readers a story
about her friend, Tim. When Tim started a new job as a manager, one of his top
priorities was communicating to his team that he valued each member’s input. So
at team meetings, as each member spoke up about whatever project they were
working on, Tim made sure he put on his “active-listening face” to signal that
he cared about what each person was saying.

But
after meeting with him a few times, Tim’s team got a very different message
from the one he intended to send. “After a few weeks of meetings,” Halvorson
explains, “one team member finally summoned up the courage to ask him the
question that had been on everyone’s mind.” That question was: “Tim, are you
angry with us right now?” When Tim explained that he wasn’t at all angry—that
he was just putting on his “active-listening face”—his colleague gently
explained that his active-listening face looked a lot like his angry face.

There’s something strange here.

Have you ever told yourself that you need to put on your “active-listening
face” in order to convince people that you are listening to them? Clearly, there
is something wrong with Tim’s way of showing people that he cares about what
they are saying.

For my part I would like to know where Tim heard about the “active-listening
face.”

In truth, he was putting on a mask. He believed that the
mask accurately expressed his intentions, but he later discovered that there is
more to listening than adopting a pose.

Surely, Halvorson is correct to say that there is a major
gap between how we see ourselves and how others see us.

Smith explains:

This
gap arises, as Halvorson explains in her book, from some quirks of human
psychology. First, most people suffer from what psychologists call “the transparency
illusion”—the belief that what they feel, desire, and intend is crystal
clear to others, even though they have done very little to communicate clearly
what is going on inside their minds.

People believe that everyone can read their emotions, so
they do not bother to communicate them. One suspects that this is a cultural
attitude.

Many people have overcome the idea that they should hide or
mask their feelings. They have been told that it is bad to keep up appearances
and to maintain a stiff upper lip.

This implies that we have reached a cultural apotheosis
where we are perfectly transparent, to the point where we do not even need to
express ourselves very clearly. Everyone knows what we feel without our
expressing it.

It’s variation on the cultural attitude that tells us to
express ourselves openly, honestly and shamelessly. Only, in the advanced
lesson, we feel that we are perfectly transparent, that we do not hide anything
and thus that everyone should know how we feel.

But, is that really Tim’s problem? Tim thought he knew what
he was showing that he was listening because he had read in a book or heard
from a consultant that the best way to show you are listening is to put on a
specific kind of facial expression.

He did not think that he was transparent. He thought that he
needed to put on the right mask in order to show that he was listening. One
wonders how he got to his exalted executive position.

While Tim was sporting his “active-listening face” those who
were talking to said “face” believed that he was scowling at them, that he was
angry with them.

Why might this be so? One suspects that Tim was not reacting
to what they say. He did not change his facial expression as a function of what
he had heard. And he remained mute, seeming to give people the silent
treatment.

If you want
people to know that you are listening to them, you cannot adopt a mask that
does not change regardless of what you are hearing. (Obviously, this shows why
someone who is conversing with a friend whose face has been Botoxed will have
an eerie feeling that his interlocutor is somehow not there.)

Also, if you want to show people that you have listened
attentively to what they are saying, how about asking a question that reflects
your understanding? Better yet, if you are an executive listening to your staff's opinions, how about adopting some of their ideas?

We show that we are listening by the way we respond to what
is being said. If someone’s remarks merely elicit a blank stare, he will feel
that he has been dismissed.

Of course, there are other kinds of misunderstanding. Smith
offers some of Halvorson’s examples:

One
person may think, for example, that by offering help to a colleague, she is
coming across as generous. But her colleague may interpret her offer as a lack
of faith in his abilities. Just as he misunderstands her, she misunderstands
him: She offered him help because she thought he was overworked and stressed.
He has, after all, been showing up early to work and going home late every day.
But that’s not why he’s keeping strange hours; he just works best when the
office is less crowded.

These
kinds of misunderstandings lead to conflict and resentment not just at work,
but at home too. How many fights between couples have started with one person
misinterpreting what another says and does? He stares at his plate at dinner
while she’s telling a story and she assumes he doesn’t care about what she’s
saying, when really he is admiring the beautiful meal she made. She goes to bed
early rather than watching their favorite television show together like they
usually do, and he assumes she’s not interested in spending time with him, when
really she’s just exhausted after a tough day at work.

Beyond our tendency to believe that those nearest and
dearest to us can read our minds, we have a tendency to prejudge, to jump to
conclusions, to believe that a specific gesture can only have one meaning.

In these examples, the problem lies in the assuming. The person
seeing the gesture assumes that it can only mean one thing. He or
she does not ask, does not inquire, does not engage a conversation.

Why do we make such assumptions? First, we believe that some
faces can only mean one thing. Second, we believe that they are necessarily
only relevant to the two people present.

It’s all about the here-and-now. One can only surmise where people
might have gotten that idea.

And, oh yes, there’s our culturally-imposed narcissism. Having
been taught that we are all the same, we read the emotions of another person as
though we had been having the same emotion. We empathize, but do not ask the
most elementary questions and do not even consider alternative interpretations.

A final point, one that Halvorson might have discussed in
her book. Since I have not read the book I do not know whether she did.

In a multicultural world the possibilities for
misunderstanding multiply. Since verbal and non-verbal gestures belong to localized social codes, when different people from different communities are following different social codes, they
will have more misunderstandings.

Two people from two different cultures will need to offer
more detailed explanations of what is on their minds.

People who have been brought up in the same community, who
have the same social codes, who follow the same customs will be less likely to
misunderstand each other.

Saturday, April 25, 2015

Those in the first category will invariably do better on the
job and in life than will those in the second.

It stands to reason. Anyone who is sufficiently humble to
know that he does not know everything will do better than someone who is so
arrogant that he thinks he knows it all.

Psychiatrists diagnose those who refuse to take advice to be
narcissists. The diagnosis rings true, but it needs to be qualified.

For decades now therapists have been encouraging people to
introspect, to get in touch with their feelings, to follow their bliss… thus,
to become more self-absorbed, more self-involved and more narcissistic.

Therapists often pursue a political and ideological agenda,
regardless of whether it is best for their patients. They encourage their
charges to defy authority, to rebel against experts, to disrespect age and experience, to assert their
independence and autonomy.

This suggests that medical science or psychological science
is telling us all not to take advice. It also denigrates anyone who would dare
ask for advice.

People who have suffered the influence of the therapy
culture do not understand that refusing to take or to ask for advice makes them
look incompetent, self-absorbed and disrespectful.

Therapy has convinced people that when they ask for advice
they are looking subservient and dependent.

When someone faces a difficult dilemma, he might well repair
to his neighborhood therapist. In many cases he will find someone who refuses
to offer advice.

If your therapist feels your pain but does not offer advice
he is telling you that it is futile to try to find a way to resolve your
dilemma by taking action in the world. He is rendering you more passive.

If the prospective patient makes the “mistake” of consulting
with a therapist who is willing to offer advice, he might very well reject it
out of hand and reject his therapist for lacking empathy.

It’s one thing to diagnose narcissism. It’s quite another to
encourage and foster it.

When therapists are not encouraging you to become more
narcissistic they are bemoaning the fact that your narcissism is so
intractable. They might even believe that it has been caused by traumatic
events from your childhood.

As long as they are encouraging you to be more narcissistic,
they should dispense with the effort to recall the past and turn their
attention to the old saying: Physician, heal thyself!

If you want to overcome your narcissism, you should develop
personal habits that bespeak the opposite of narcissism. You might start
thinking in terms of “we” or “you” over “I.” You might start doing unto others
as you would have others do unto you. You might perform a good deed for someone
else every day.

Or else, you should start learning how to take advice.

Begin by asking for advice. If your gut or your bliss is directing you to do this or that, you do well to run your plan by someone who is older and wiser.

Taking advice does not mean doing what you are told. You
might hear a piece of advice and recognize that neither it nor your prior
inclination is best.

Surely, you can take the advice as given. But, if the discussion causes you to think up a new and better plan--better than both plans-- you are free to follow it.

If you seek out advice, you can take it or you can use it to
formulate a better plan. Taking advice means that you will not be following
your initial inclination, your gut or your bliss.

If you are starting out on your career, you should always
give full consideration to the views of those older and wiser than you. Often they
will offer advice, whether you like it or not. If they do not do so, ask for it.

If you actively ask for advice you are humbling yourself. If you have only been on the job for a month, no one will expect that you know everything... yet.

Also, when you ask for advice you show respect for the other person, for his age, his wisdom and his
experience.

If you do not respect people, you have no right to expect
that they will respect you.

By asking for advice, you are striking a blow against your
narcissistic tendencies.

Better yet, when you ask for advice, you will look smarter than the guy down the corridor who believes that he must make his
own mistakes.

New research has shown that people who ask for advice are
considered to be smarter and more competent.

There is no special virtue to making your own mistakes. It
is best to avoid avoidable errors when it is at all possible.

Of course, this only works when you ask someone for advice about something in which he or she possesses expertise. Asking an auto mechanic
for advice on how to cook lasagna does not make you look exceptionally bright.
Asking a chef for advice on an oil change does not make you look very smart.

Naturally, some people ask for advice because they want to
flatter their superiors. Some people follow advice because they have told—by people
like me—that’s it’s the right thing to do.

None of it matters. It’s better to ask for advice for the
wrong reason than not to ask for advice at all.

If you are not in the habit of asking for advice, if your
narcissism is such that you find it distasteful to ask for advice, if you feel
like you are selling out and making yourself look weak… then your first effort
to ask for advice will not feel very good or very right. It might feel fake and
insincere, as though you are acting like a sycophant.

If you ask for advice and act as though nothing has changed, then you are, by
definition, being an insincere flatterer. If you ask for advice and then take
it you are being sincere. This is true even if you do not believe that
the advice is very good.